Re: Weirdness with AlphaPC 164: installing SRM firmware, etc.

[Joel Votaw <jovotaw cs nmsu edu>]

After playing around with the PC164 some this afternoon, I have made a
fair amount of progress.  Thought I'd share my experiences.

Following Jim Barriault's (?) advice I replaced the battery.  It takes a
CR2032; I found a DL2032 (Duracell work-alike) at the local Best Buy, and
it seems to work fine.

I plugged in a new floppy drive and cable, which seems to work as
intended, which none of the previous ones did.  I'm not sure if this is
because the other two floppies were bad or because changing the battery
helped.

After that I successfully upgraded from ARC to SRM using the fail-safe
booter.  On reboot I only got a blinking cursor in a field of blue, but
(following Robb Romans' advice) I hit the return key and promptly got a
>>> prompt.  Shoulda thought of that myself...

I'm now trying to determine what kind of SCSI card to use in there.  SRM
didn't recognize the Adaptec 2940UW at all, of course.  It recognizes a
Symbios card but won't give a firmware path to the device or list any
drives off of it.  I need to double-check that it is a fully supported
model, and then trouble shoot from there (not sure the card works in a PC,
either). 

It looks like SRM v5.5 recognizes the IDE controller.  It even gives me a
path to the controller but until I plug some IDE drives back in I don't
know what will happen from there.  However, given that the XP1000 ships
with an IDE CD-ROM (if I recall correctly), I think there is a fighting
chance of getting it working as an IDE-only system if I can't find a SCSI
controller that works.  (I want to try out Digital UNIX, thus the note
about the XP1000.)  Of course, it'd be a shame to waste that fast of a
system on IDE drives...

The point of all this is that people just starting in on using the PC164
should:

- Replace the battery before anything else.

- Try different floppies, drives, cables, etc. if you have a hard time
using them from the Firmware.

- Check the hardware compatibility list for what SRM supports.  (I am
about to go do that myself.)

All of that has been mentioned here before, or is (should be) obvious, but
I thought I'd confirm it and list it all together. 

More later,

	-Joel